Paper Tiger Television

Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television:PTTV 25-Year Anniversary

"The media has become more doctrinaire and rigid, and more and more people are rightly seeking serious alternatives of the kind Paper Tiger has been providing so well." - Noam Chomsky

Los Angeles premiere | 2007, 45 min., DV

Jack H. Skirball Screening Series

Formed at the height of the Reagan era to "smash the myths of the information industry," Paper Tiger Television is a collective of artists and activists whose raucous public-access shows are some of the quirkiest and most compelling alternative media ever to hit the airwaves. PTTV now turns the cameras on itself and serves up a revelatory, hugely entertaining mosaic of archival footage, hand-crafted animations, video shorts, and interviews with media critics, historians and Tigers past and present -- among them, DeeDee Halleck, Jesse Drew, George Stoney, Dierdre Boyle and Mary Feaster. The piece will be followed by one of PTTV’s “classics,” Sock Ads: Judith Williamson Consumes Passionately in Southern California.

In person: Maria Juliana Byck, Jesse Drew

The Jack H. Skirball Screening Series is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

Paper Tiger Television celebrates 25 years of media art, activism and analysis with the premiere of a new documentary, Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television and a California Art, Activism and Analysis Tour.

To celebrate two and a half decades of leadership in media art, activism and analysis, PTTV has organized an Art, Activism and Analysis Tour in eight venues throughout California. REDCAT’s screening will be followed by a discussion of the continuing relevance of PTTV’s pioneering work and the ongoing need for innovative and independent information in today’s new multi-media environment.

Judith Williamson examines consumer culture in America, from the multiplication of products and their functions to capitalism's colonization of the body. What is the meaning of freedom in modern day America? Is it the freedom to change the world or the freedom to change our socks? Williamson is the author of Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (Boyars, 1978), Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (Boyars, 1986), Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism, 1980-1990 (Boyars, 1993) and L'Homme Fatal: Watching Ourselves at the Movies (Random House, 1999)

A ground-breaking innovator in video art and public access television in the early 1980s, Paper Tiger Television developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetics that experimented with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics, performance and live television. PTTV, founded on the ideal that freedom of speech through access to the means of communication is essential in a democratic society, regularly exposed the hidden agenda of the mainstream media and questioned the powerful grip of corporate influence on media content to become the first nationally disseminated public access television program. As comments Dee Dee Halleck, one of the original founders of PTTV, “it is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.”

PTTV has been recognized for critical analysis of information sources and for being on the cutting edge of video with screenings, exhibits and installations in museums and galleries around the world. PTTV productions have proven to be invaluable video documentation of the ideas and insights of some of our nation’s most notable media critics and public intellectuals. The PTTV archive houses one of the most unique and important historical alternative media collections, encompassing critical components of the evolution of public access television, video art, video activism, and media reform.

PTTV influenced and supported grassroots media activist organizations through providing an innovative model for community media spurring the global development of a do-it-yourself (DIY) community media movement. Today’s burgeoning independent media movements can trace their roots directly to the network of media activists developed by PTTV throughout the 1980s. With the recent explosion of Internet video distribution, DIY media has grown from an isolated endeavor to an increasingly powerful international phenomenon. Now is the ideal time to look back at the pioneering work of a New York City video collective that began making its anarchic, improvisational commentary and satire on modern media culture 25 years ago.

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REDCAT NEWS

The New Original Works Festival (NOW) is a three-week interdisciplinary program offering a variety of short works and some longer projects in their Los Angeles premieres. The Festival takes place in July and August and artists are given development support through rehearsal space, technical assistance, access to equipment and an honorarium. Projects are selected through a proposal process, with an emphasis on new projects in development and/or early career artists.